Power In Lord Of The Flies

“Power lay in the brown swell of his forearms: authority sat on his shoulder and chattered in his ear like an ape” (Golding 210). In Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, the struggle of power is a vile war between two of the main characters, Ralph and Jack, as them and a group of other English schoolboys are stranded on an island after a plane crash. With no person over the age of twelve present, the boys have to establish their own society with rules similar to the rules they have been raised with their entire lives. In turn to mirror society, the boys elect a leader, but not without a struggle between Ralph and Jack, who both want the power that comes with the position, but have different priorities when it comes to leading. This tension established

As the plot progressed, Jack started to gain more power from what he originally held with his choir boys in the first chapter. After his bitter loss to Ralph for the chief position, Jack becomes a hunter, which as its turns out changes his entire persona for the rest of the novel. The reader can see his personality change foreshadowed early on in the novel when Jack goes hunting alone for one of the first times; “For a minute [Jack] became less a hunter than a furtive thing, ape-like among the tangle of trees” (60). Jack slowly, as this quote showcases, is losing his human-like qualities turning into not a person, but an animal. This can especially be seen later in the novel when Jack is in any leadership position, where he acts more like a pack leader than a diplomat. In all the chaos that the boys face with the “beast” and other environmental dangers, Jack and his entourage of hunters, in the later chapters of the novel, begin to distance themselves further from Ralph, Piggy, and the others and begin to focus on more selfish tasks, such as having fun while hunting and not keeping the signal fire alive. The difference between Jack and Ralph on the priorities of the island begins a civil war among the boys and splits the

While on an island without any adults, these characters both try and succeed at one point or another to establish themselves as leaders. As the elected choice, Ralph leads with intelligence, caution, and maturity at the beginning of the novel and is even able to establish rules, tasks, and some routine over the boys. Although Ralph leads well, he begins to lose his grip over the boys as their stay on the island lengthens. Soon enough power shifts to Jack, who has been an antagonist to Ralph’s leadership since the beginning of the novel. As a leader, Jack leads with fear tactics and no rules, which even leads to the death of some characters towards the end of the novel. The struggle between Ralph and Jack for the leadership position turns a group of schoolboys on each other, thrusting them into a civil war, where corruption and fear are the causes and bloodshed is the aftereffect. Besides the loss of friends, the boys in Lord of The Flies lost something that they will never be able to recover, for the things they have seen and experienced are too harsh to let it live any longer, and this happens to be their